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Daily news and top headlines for broadband communications engineering and design professionals

Cox yesterday officially unveiled the new user interface (UI) and program guide it’s been working on with NDS for more than a year. By virtue of being based on tru2way, that UI won’t – can’t – be available on Cox’s oldest legacy boxes.

TellyTopia has come up with the complete inverse of – and what sounds like a perfect complement to – the TV Everywhere and Sling concepts. At least one major East Coast MSO is planning to deploy it, the company says.

The premise behind the Smart Grid concept is that power consumption can be monitored, managed and controlled. In other words, the energy network should be a two-way network. In other other words, the power network is going to act like a communications network.

Verizon filed two patent infringement suits against Cablevision this week. Cablevision doesn’t want to comment beyond calling it a nuisance suit, and Verizon doesn’t want to comment beyond a statement that raises more questions than it answers.

Republican lawmakers are attacking the Obama administration’s broadband stimulus program. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) questioned the program’s cost, its effectiveness and its efficiency in a formal statement at a House subcommittee meeting.

Big changes at Motorola. Home & Networks Mobility is going to be bundled with the handset division whether or not the handset operation gets sold. And if Joe Cozzolino can pull it off, you can kiss the CMTS goodbye –

There’s only so much that cable companies can squeeze capex, so it’s only natural that they have been turning their attention to opex. That puts a premium on making sure operations are running efficiently. Meanwhile, intensifying competition means always having to say you’re sorry for the slightest of glitches (don’t even mention outages), which also puts a premium on operational efficiency.

Two new home networking standards – G.hn and WHDI – are on the way. Each has its respective champions, who expect to not just earn a place beside MoCA, Wi-Fi, HPNA, Ethernet, HDMI, HomePlug, UWB and other extant communications standards, but to eventually supplant most of them.

Sling Media wants to point out that if you want all TV literally everywhere, well then TV Everywhere is profoundly misnamed. On the other hand, Sling can give cable the ability to get TV literally everywhere with its new Sling-enabled, tru2way-based cable HD DVR.

Decades and decades ago, TV viewers began to treat commercial breaks not as extraordinary opportunities to increase their brand loyalty as was their duty, but as opportunities for unauthorized activities that took them out of earshot of their TVs, such as fetching bowls of crab meat & Jell-o salad.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski formally put the communications industry on notice that network neutrality regulations of some sort are going to be adopted. Various interests began jockeying for position immediately, ranging from the cable industry’s admonitory caution for a deliberately measured policy to the unequivocal opposition from free-market absolutists.

Ever since the D.C. Court of Appeals killed the notion of ownership caps, people have been speculating about cash-rich Comcast buying another cable company. Some are openly agitating for it, in fact. That, in turn, is giving rise to speculation of counter-maneuvers by rivals.

Two of CableLabs’ most recent mega-projects – DOCSIS 3.0 and tru2way – are well into the implementation stage. Dick Green, who directed the operation for almost as long as it’s existed, has passed the torch to Paul Liao. Now what?

Imagine chucking your remote and just waving at your TV to get what you want. A technology that will enable that and much, much more – some of it a little creepy – prevailed as the innovation most likely to become a successful commercial product at the Innovation Showcase at CableLabs’ annual Summer Conference.

It looks like Wall Street is going to encourage more of a type of deal between Web sites and ISPs that is arguably anti-competitive and anti-consumer. A deal between Disney/ESPN and Comcast last week elicited the objections of the American Cable Association. Now a prominent analyst with Pali Research has come out in favor of the ESPN maneuver, drawing the ACA’s ire.

In the last year or so, the cable industry has started talking about anytime/anywhere communications. Cable either has a blind spot when it comes to the subject, or maybe it’s just drawing attention away from a weak spot.